Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Freight Trade Association declares war on people cycling. Seems to lash out at people who use bikes for the fact that lorries are killing people instead of calling for safe space for cycling on London's streets; tarnishes other responsible freight associations in the process

What did the Freight Trade Association, the body that represents HALF the UK freight fleet have to say on the matter? This, believe it or not, is what the Association's Director of Policy, Karen Dee (I've met her and she said pretty similar stuff in public) had to say:

A responsible lorry-driver on his phone in the middle of the A3 at Kennington, next to the Cycle Super Highway

The last time that I had a horrible near-miss experience on my bike was on Super Highway 8. Cycling in from Wandsworth, there were parked cars on my left and in the middle of the road, a traffic island. At exactly this point, an articulated lorry decided to overtake me. The lorry would certainly hit the back of my bicycle and send me flying. My only option was to bail off the road. So I did. I bailed into a parked car. A shocked pedestrian came to help me.

The Freight Trade Association is right that road users must ride or drive responsibly. Yes, there is a problem with some cyclists not obeying some traffic regulations.

The pendulum of responsibility swings both ways, Ms Dee, and if you're going to start throwing stones about the place, you'd better be sure your own glasshouse is made of stronger materials.

The Freight Trade Association could, and should, be supporting the moves to create safe space for cycling. Instead, it is victim-blaming in the extreme. Instead of calling for ways to magically make hundreds of thousands of people cycle as if they were in motor vehicles, it could join the current thinking, displayed earlier this week at the London Cycling Campaign ride to Parliament: Create Safe Space for Cycling. That's the only way to keep lorries and people on bikes apart. And it's the only thing that's going to work. Victim-blaming is immature, irresponsible and makes dialogue an impossibility. The Freight Trade Association should know better.

Boris Johnson and Stephen Hammond MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport, earlier today. No thanks to the Freight Trade Association

Let's take the conflict out of our transport networks. Let's encourage all road users to act responsibly but let's also look at how the transport network works for different types of people who need to use it. Let's not resort to pathetically juvenile and extremely irresponsible victim-blaming of the sort that the Freight Trade Association has just displayed.